When it has been demonstrated over and over again, how little they think of anyone beneath them.
Some.people priase Hitler.
Because, for all of the awfulness they bring to the rest of us, they are human.
Humans who the other humans desperately need to be stripped of their wealth and power, and for whom the doing of which might offer them some small chance to save themselves from the yawning void of more more moremoremoremoremoremore
Yeah we humanize them because it’s important to remember that essentially anyone that ends up in their position will behave similarly. They aren’t demons, they’re humans. We should stop putting people in their position.
This. As soon as we treat them as “only monsters,” we start to think that “regular humans” aren’t capable of monstrous things.
Because they are human. What is the difficulty here? They’re not reptilians or space aliens or inter-dimensional beings. It’s in all of us.
because treating them as ‘other’ makes it easy to justify violence and hatred.
realizing they aren’t that different, or worse, that you’d be the same as them in their position, makes you less likely to justify violence and hatred against them, because you’d justify it against yourself, which of course, most everyone is 100% against. further, the rhetoric among leftists is the wealth is original sin, you can never be washed clean of it and there is no good wealthy person because wealth is inherently evil.
i have spent time around legit wealthy people. what nobody gets is that they don’t think they are wealthy. human psychology adjusts such that no matter how much money you make you always think you need more, and that amount is usually double what you currently make. and like most people, the wealthy want to live in a bubble-existence where they are only around people who are like themselves. the major difference being that the wealthy are more capable of doing this than most of us, but the drive to bubblefy their existence is the same as every other person.
Why do the working glass poor vote Trump
Because they’re fucking stupid.
because trump appeals to them. the democrats don’t, and tend to shit all over them as being unworthy pathetic losers for not having college degrees and high paying office jobs.
Can you give us an example of Democrats shitting on people for not having college degrees and high paying jobs? I’m asking because can certainly quote wealthy Republicans shitting on people for being poor, through their words and actions, but I’m not sure I’ve seen a Democrat just up and insult someone for not having an office job.
Hillary was probably the worse:
I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product… So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, ‘Make America Great Again’, was looking backwards,
Obama:
Referring to working-class voters in old industrial towns decimated by job losses, the presidential hopeful said: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
John Kerry:
You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq
These are slip ups, if you search for coded ways they describe their opponents, you can find a lot more “low information” and “uneducated” examples.
Remember Joe the plumber? He was a reaction to republican voters feeling unrepresented as blue collar workers.
This kind of class contempt absolutely isn’t unique to Democrats, but their obsession with courting higher educated voters has branded their contempt for those who aren’t.
We cannot understand class behavior by examining individual morality. Viewing the capital owning class as a collection of mustache twirling villains is not a useful framing. Rather, we should look at them as the human personification of capital itself. Their social being, their entire material condition, is defined by the accumulation of private profit and the protection of property relations that enforce their dominance.
Their inability to relate is not a personal failing but a direct result of their objective position in the capitalist mode of production. They live in a world insulated from the precarity of rent, medical debt, and wage slavery that defines life for the working majority. Their consciousness is shaped by them being insulated from the problems regular people experience. Therefore, critique of their lack of empathy is a liberal dead end because it mistakes a systemic outcome for a personal choice.
The focus must be the capitalist system itself, which necessarily produces the inequality and the divide between the capitalists and the workers. The fundamental contradiction between the socialized nature of production and the private appropriation of wealth is the core issue. The solution is to dismantle the economic base that creates them as a class and move towards a system where the means of production are socially owned, abolishing the very material conditions that breed alienation and disparity.
Hot take, we should deliberately dehumanize rich people.
This is an idiotic post. Yes, they are human. Yes they may make bad decisions, but so do poor people. They just don’t make enough to matter.
I’m aphantasic. Until people started really talking about how they “see” things in their heads, I assumed it was all just a figure of speech. Flashbacks, thought bubbles, daydreams in media… I assumed that was all just, you know, an easy way to get the information across. Now I know you freaks actually see stuff and the mind’s eye isn’t some convenient turn of phrase. Weirdos!
In a similar vein, I have empathy. It is difficult for me to intuitively understand the perspective of someone who doesn’t have any. As an example, it’s hard for me to understand a person who’s exploiting children a la Epstein. And in truth, I don’t want to understand them, either. Even knowing how many of them are the way they are… if I had a little less introspection, I’d probably just default to “they’re just like us.”
I am not sure it is really about Capitalism but the broader human Centralization whatever its political or economic system. We Centralize and someone has to be at the top as that is our nature and those at the top exploit as power corrupts. This is wired into us a species and it has brought us a long way for better and for worse.
that isn’t what empthy is.
epstein has empathy. it was just for donald trump and his friends and family. most people only have empathy for their immediate family and friends. that’s normal. it’s the scope and target of the empathy you have issue with.
most people only have empathy for their immediate family and friends. that’s normal.
Speak for yourself.
Hm. I think that if you don’t have empathy for more than your own immediate friends and family, you don’t have empathy. You have concern over how other people’s pain directly impacts you. That’s egoism, not empathy.
Plus, Epstein considered all the rest of them targets too, just a different type.
right, so it’s only empathy if i’m upset about people who i will never meet who i have no connection to and have no interest in… and why would ever empathize with such theoretical people?
or are you saying empathy is purely a theretical construct totally devoid of my immediate real world experience? hence i can’t have empathy for my friend who just had to put down his cat, because he is my friend! i can only have empathy for who… people starving in africa?
People are brainwashed. They have been for generations. And only very few even like to admit that they are brainwashed. I was too… Luckily I woke up, and became both woke and able to think critically…
It’s important to remember that the actions of the working class are primarily derived from their class interests, not because individuals are dicks. Humanizing even shitty individuals is an important part of persuading people away from thinking in terms of individual people and more about the dialectics of class.
they’re just subs that are into bdsm
Financial domination
They are as human as anyone else. We should be cognizant of that. They are human beings within a human system. Move beyond anger and hate, and ask what must be done to end suffering and injustice.
For all the quips about guillotines, the first fix needs to be removing their excess wealth, not their heads.
But how to do that without removing their head?
Ah, that was some clever wordplay, given that one of the definitions of capital is “of or pertaining to the head”!
the government.
ask what must be done to end suffering and injustice.
kill them to stop them killing us
If given a chance they will kill. To obtain that level of wealth one generally has to have a sociopathic level of lack of empathy. Maybe not all are like Trump and itching to blow people up and put people to death. A lot are probably less actively bloodthirsty (thankfully) but at the same time have no issue taking away your health insurance, your income, your housing, etc if it impacts their bottom line even though they already have enough resources to last 100,000,000 lifetimes in extreme excess.
“Oh but if they let these things change they would lose their wealth” exactly - when it comes down to it, they would rather leave you to die than risk losing their obscene wealth. So this is violence, and therefore violence is an appropriate response, especially when the state continually and repeatedly fails over decades (arguably from its inception) to rein them in.
Numerous reasons.
Lots of people don’t want anyone to disturb the system…”upend the apple cart” as it were. A known, even if shitty, is still better than the unknown. Like people pining for lives under the rule of some harsh autocrat. Even if your neighbor disappeared one night thanks to the State Police, it was better than worrying about the less-harsh policing that lets kids get away with graffiti-ing everything or the petty theft you’re always hearing about.
Also, if they come for the rich people, they’ll come for you. If they tax the rich, they’ll tax you. If you support the rich, people will remember that, and they’ll come for you.
Maybe a little of the “I could be rich someday” idea too, so they support obscene wealth with the idea they could somehow also be rich no matter how minuscule the chance. The irony being the wealthy are the ones supporting barriers preventing you from even achieving financial security, forget ever being wealthy.
bingo.
easy to see in russia. in the 90s russia was democratic and free… but in economic collapse and choas. a lot of people quickly wanted to go back to soviet stability and the subsequent oppression and Putin capitalized on that and he’s popular because he vastly improved the russian economy, despite cracking down on freedom.
people value stability and predictability. life is optimistic when you have a clear vision and path to achieve your goals. it is miserable when there isn’t a clear path to your goals.
Absolutely. And that also applies to some immigrants from harsh dictatorships. I worked with a pro-trump Russian. He liked trump specifically because he wanted someone to “crack skulls” and all that. (This was during the BLM protests.) He wanted the police state to shut up everything inconvenient to his way of thought.
At what point is someone wealthy using gapminder levels of income where level 1 is earning $2 a day, level 2 is $8, level 3 $32, etcetera?
And at what point is a person in power?
Is Zelensky in power? Xi Jinping?
Greta Thunberg? John Oliver? JT Chapman? Karl Marx? The admin of this site?The OP made a distinction between wealth and power. Your question salad conflating the two, even if wealth does grant power, is muddying the original question with “What is the definition of ‘is’?” It isn’t meaningful.
What the fuck does any of that rambling have to do with the question?
i mean, we can easily define it as some multiple of the poverty level.
and in fact in the USA economy it’s pretty easy, if you are in the top 10% currently your wealth will grow and the economy is great for you. if you are in the bottom 90% your economic fortunes are stagnating or declining. the top 10% of income earners is 150K+. once you start making over 100K you are more or less doing very well.
Because they get paid to do so.
